Design Automation Conference Recognizes Coskun, Meng

The ultimate goal of much recent research in computing is to create low-power, high-performance systems. In pursuit of that goal, Assistant Professor Ayse Coskun (ECE) and Jie Meng (PhD ’13) have devoted more than a year to exploring 3D chip stacking. Their project, “3D Systems for Low-Power High-Performance Computing,” aims to develop a set of methods and tools that will enable 3D systems to be used in building more efficient multiprocessors.

“3D design has been an active area of research for the last decade,” Coskun said, “but the next few years will be the timeframe when we’ll finally see these products in the market.”

“It’s a hot topic in computing research,” added Meng. “We’re seeing a lot of progress, and others are starting to take notice.”

“We were honored that our research project had been selected,” said Coskun, who will be recognized with Meng at the DAC conference in June. “This is a prestigious award for a junior faculty member and a PhD student.”

The scholarship can also be applied to other research areas Coskun’s Boston University team is working on, including energy and performance management of manycore systems, liquid-cooled high performance systems, and software optimization for green computing.

Prior to working with Coskun, Meng was new to design automation and computer architecture research. Now Meng’s work has led to a paper that was presented at the Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI in May 2011, and she also coauthored a forthcoming journal article in IEEE Micro.

“She was new to this area a year ago, and now she is becoming an expert in architectural performance simulation, a key component in evaluating performance and energy of 3D stacked systems,” said Coskun.

Meng will soon pursue a summer internship at Sandia National Laboratories, where she will continue her research in improving performance and energy efficiency of multicore systems.

“Coming to BU has provided a lot of opportunities for me,” she said. “It’s a great location for research, I’ve made a lot of friends, and the professors are always very helpful.”